ABOUT THOSE PLANES

They’re almost there.

Sweat beads above Lynn’s lip, mottling the heavy powder she’s daubed. Under her hair, too, at the back of her neck and around her ears—this damp heat, and also, in her mouth, the grit and bile of salt that has settled and persisted in the eight—no, seven—months since she moved with Ed to Myrtle Beach. The ocean won’t turn loose of Lynn even when they’re driving away from it. Oh God. Jesus and Joseph. She grabs at the vents, diamonds casting giddy lights. We’re almost there, she says, more to herself than to Ed because really, when you get right down to it, Ed isn’t all that pleasant to talk to. Lynn quit trying almost as soon as she started. We’re almost there.

What’d you mean? Ed says and calls her silly. Silly old goose. We are there. Don’t you see we’re here?

Lynn turns her head, and when she does, it’s as if the edges of the world blur and run like those watercolor beach scenes she and every other old lady and some old men try to paint. Idiots in white linen. Thin skin burning. At the beach because where else? That’s how Ed put it. Everything is so easy for him. The beach is where the old people go, and so they went, and it is like so much else Lynn had done in that she did it without question. That is to say, all the questions came too late.

There are houses and trees and mailboxes, and if Lynn focuses the center of her vision, she can see, she can certainly read the sign that says Quinby Place, but nothing looks the same. Nothing looks right, and she turns to tell Ed because even though he’s nothing to talk to, Ed is like Myrtle Beach in that, for Lynn, there doesn’t seem to be an alternative, but when Lynn opens her mouth, it’s Ed’s voice—gravel and gruff—saying, There, see.

He’s pulling over, the ridiculous white and chrome hulk of an SUV, so oversized even Ed calls it The Rig. Ed’s vision isn’t what it used to be, and he scrapes the curb with a tire. There’s a sharp grinding sound like something heavy about to give way, and Lynn blinks and sees her very own porch, the red brick arches that made her say, the first time she saw it, Hansel and Gretel.

It’s little wonder, though, that Lynn didn’t know it at first—the yard all gone to weeds and grown up and all her wicker porch furniture gone not with her and Ed to Myrtle Beach but to the Salvation Army. And the paint around the windows flaking, and even though that one shutter had always hung crooked, it is, Lynn notes, more crooked now. There is about the whole place a sense of sag—longer than seven months worth—that does more than irritate Lynn. The disrepair, the passing of time and neglect that’s caused it, scares Lynn nearly to the point of phobia. This is a fear she knows well, a tremor at the edges, which is how Lynn sees the world. Her neck, her arms, but more than her body—Lynn is smart enough to know she can’t put any stock into that anymore—what’s inside, everything spinning in an unsteady wobble, and David at the center of it. David coming out of the house, and he is pale, and he is swollen, and he is nothing like what Lynn ever wanted him to be, but here he is, opening the door. Here he is still calling her Mama.

There had never been much touching when David was little. Lynn herself had been raised the same way, as if at a distance, but now David embraces her. They say affection is important. They say humans and other animals don’t develop properly without it. David’s arms are around her, and she pats his shoulders. She can smell him as strongly as when he was a teenager, and he is soft. He yields in ways a man shouldn’t.

Ed, for all his faults and his failing eyes, is still, at seventy-six, a hard man. Even his belly, which is a low and small paunch, is so firm that Lynn’s finger bounces back when she teases him, pokes him there. When she’s in a better way than she is now.

Ed pops the great hatch of the monstrous SUV and hollers for David to come help with the bags, and in the backseat, on the hook, the tuxes and Lynn’s sailor dress.

Go help, Lynn says and waves David away so that she can begin the process of dismounting what amounts, in her mind, to a military tank. It’s like we’re going to war, she said, the first time Ed took her out in it, and she meant to be funny, but what she said wasn’t funny at all.

In the little carport beside the house, she sees the blue Buick she drove for thirty years, the car that David still drives. A few weeks ago, David had to get some work done on it—new belts, a general fluid flushing. A long mysterious process that would cost a couple of thousand dollars, and Lynn said, Don’t do it. You ought to get something else, something sporty.

And David said he’d think about it, but in the end, he’d had the work done, said he liked that car, didn’t say he didn’t want a new one, that he couldn’t bear that change or any other, but Lynn knew it to be true all the same as she signed her name to the check and mailed it to him. This—the going-along with whatever David wanted and calling it support, calling it love—was so much easier than the physical contact all the experts said was so important or so Lynn read in all the right books as she thought about David and about her own childhood and what was missing.

The weather, the roads, the traffic, which there was none of. Soon, Ed will have exhausted all his topics of conversation. He’s closed the hatch, and he’s pulling the suitcase behind him just like he pulls his golf clubs, like he’s waiting for somebody else to take over. And David is carrying Lynn’s overnight case and holding the garment bags, the dress and the two tuxedos, out away from him like a person will hold anything he doesn’t trust.

Don’t drag, Lynn says, and David lifts his arm up higher.

Up the sidewalk and the stairs and on the porch, and Lynn saying, What happened to all my roses? And Lynn saying, Even weeds ought to be mowed. And Lynn seeing the tray of butts and saying, I thought you quit. And Lynn hearing herself say all this, Lynn hearing herself rattle because a part of her, because most of her, is somewhere else, higher than all this. Most of her is quiet and watching these things unfold. Most of her wonders what it is she says and why she even bothers.

A darkness in the house. An absence of light, but also something else, shadows magnified by the very brightness of the day, and it’s strange to be back in the place one used to live. Strange to see, as Lynn does, some of her old furniture because, despite Ed’s best efforts, they hadn’t gotten rid of everything she owned—the junk, Ed called it. They had been in the process of going through the junk when Lynn told David, when she couldn’t put it off any longer. She told him that she and Ed were married and moving to Myrtle Beach, and David said, Don’t, and Lynn said, It’s too late, and David said, Then I’m moving back.

He’d been married, too—David had. For a short time, and Lynn knew it was doomed from the start even though she’d been the one to shoo David out of the house. She’d been the one to tell him he needed to live his own life, take some classes, get a job, something. He’d tried, he said. He’d done his best, but marriage, for David, was just another thing adults were supposed to do, no different than getting a driver’s license or voting.

David isn’t stupid. In fact, he’s very smart about, for example, taking things apart and putting them together again. But he doesn’t feel like other people. For David, it’s all or nothing, and for anyone other than Lynn—his teachers, his wife—David’s emotions, his attitudes are difficult to predict. But Lynn understands that it doesn’t matter if David is thirty-six or sixty-three because, in this way, in the manner he reacts to the world, he will always be fifteen. There isn’t much else that Lynn knows with such certainty.

There on the table is another one of David’s airplanes, the models he assembles by what seems like the thousands. And Ed says as he passes through to the bedroom, See you got a new toy, and Lynn wants to slap him across the face because he’s cruel and nobody to talk to, and nothing is as simple as all that. She wants to slap David, too, for the airplane, for letting her roses go, for lots of things. For a minute there, she'd felt some better, but now she feels worse, and she, the old goose, stumbles around in the dark house until she remembers, yes, down the hall and to the right. Close the door. Turn the lock. See the face in the mirror—pale and lined and sometimes only vaguely familiar. See a life as it was and as it is now and as it will be, eventually, no longer at all. Lynn isn’t surprised by the sickness, by the waves that come up from her toes.

What is strange, Lynn thinks, is how a person can keep from doubling over. What is a miracle is that some days we manage to hold straight and keep our feet flat on the ground.

Lynn washes her face. Then she changes her mind and turns on the tub faucet as hot as hot will go. The tub isn’t clean like she kept it, but there is a bottle of Mr. Bubble, which Lynn opens and pours under the running water until the foam begins to stack.

What’re you doing? Knock, knock, and it’s Ed saying it’s the middle of the afternoon, saying we just got here, saying, A bath? Now? Lynn. He jerks the doorknob.

Lynn eyes the swiveling brass, the lock that catches, and for a minute, she tricks herself into believing that on the other side of the door is a criminal. On the other side of the door is a person with only bad intentions. The knob shakes one way and then the other, and within Lynn, there is that turning of fear, a genuine surge of dread and panic. Stop it, she yells, and she tells herself she has to be heard over the water, but underneath the fear, there’s an anger, a frustration that is every bit as solid as the faucet she grips and turns. Just stop already, she screams. Can’t you hear I’m in the tub? I’m in the tub, Ed!

She’s on the edge of the tub, still in her clothes, crouched and listening, and on the other side of the door, the thug, the creep, the enemy says, All right, all right, and something else Lynn doesn’t hear because, finally, he’s gone. Finally, he’s left her.

He’ll hate her for this, for leaving him alone with David no sooner than they got here, he’ll say. You know how me and him get on, and what he means is not at all. What he means is David doesn’t get on with anyone.

Lynn pushes herself up from the side of the tub. She undresses and eases over the side. She’s started hanging onto things. Her hands at the end of the day are a grimy mess. She feels herself clinging. Stair rails and door knobs and when there is nothing else, at the very walls around her. She’s had some trouble with her hip, and at her age, she knows, there is always the danger of falling. Several women from the watercolor group have gone down just in the past few months. Broken ankle. Broken leg. Broken wrist from the hand that tried in vain, too late to catch the body’s weight. And then the hospital and the rehab. And then the nursing home. The very earth on which they stood pitched and rolled so that they were always fighting against it, and Lynn would have preferred to retire to any place besides the ocean, any place that seemed steadier.

But even now she’s pulled toward the water. Mr. Bubble smells like bubblegum, the kind she chewed as a girl—that initial brilliant, if fleeting, sweetness. She leans back and closes her eyes and against such darkness, and sometimes now in the light, certain pictures appear. This time a feather-capped lady and an elephant in dirty sequins and Lynn’s own body, fifteen herself and so strong, she might have stepped right up and swung from the trapeze out of the crowd and into the rafters. She had the feeling anyway, when she caught just the right line with her charcoal. Some of her best work, those sketches at the circus. Real promise.

She feels better—more herself, she thinks—as she gets out of the water, towels herself off, and crosses the hall to get dressed. Comfortable clothes, all cotton and elastic, and her hair up and cool, and in the kitchen, Ed and David are eating sandwiches, and there are times when Lynn experiences a disturbing terror, but there are spaces, too, when things smear in such a way as to create an altogether different scene, say not enemies but a father and a son sharing a meal. Say a loving mother pouring up a glass of lemonade. Say her telling them and a part of her believing, I’m so glad we’re here. We’re going to have a great time.

She met Ed at an oyster bake. It was the sort of event put on by the sort of people who never forget to consider the widows. And this is how they think of Lynn now that she’s old, now that enough time has passed that people forget or choose not to remember or just don’t care about what really happened. To them, Lynn’s no different than old Clarice Powell and the lady, Miriam, from down the street. Lynn doesn’t think of herself as a widow, but maybe she is, maybe Gary is dead. He might have been dead for years, and she wouldn’t know. No one would think to call.

It dawns on Lynn that maybe somewhere people think Gary is a widower. Maybe they imagine Lynn is dead. And she tries to picture herself, a ghost haunting the other side of the country. Somehow, it feels right. It feels right and good.

The oyster bake was a year ago February, and by that time, David was already divorced but still living in Columbia doing something or other. Computers. Systems. Something. His apartment there, his life there, is to Lynn a kind of haze, a phase she didn’t really have time to understand before it was over.

And that time in her own life isn’t much clearer. She doesn’t remember how it happened between her and Ed, the particulars of it anyway. Only that they met at this oyster bake and then there were some lunches and dinners and sometime in all that she became aware that Ed lived comfortably. There was the golf course and the big house and, of course, the The Rig, and, too, the plans that Ed, like every other well-to-do fogy within a two-hundred-mile radius, had made to retire to Myrtle Beach.

And maybe there was some excitement at first. Some flutter of real happiness, but in the end, it all seemed like something Lynn let happen more than anything Lynn actually desired. Her whole life, up until that moment, was year after year of waiting. Even before Gary left, it seemed she was only biding her time until she became someone different. A famous artist. A better mother. Things she couldn’t even name. When Ed came along, she was nearly at the end of it all, and she was worn out, and if nothing else, Ed was a kind of final act, and so she said, Okay. Yes. Myrtle Beach. Or at least she didn’t say no.

Bizarre, she would describe a world—this world—in which she found herself getting ready, re-powdering her face and lining her eyes so that she might stand before an audience at the Black Creek Land Trust Ball and introduce this man—her newlywed husband—the oldest living member of the board, who now, in the living room, snored and twitched as he napped, his paunch made paunchier by the hoagie roll and tuna he’d eaten with David.

Absurd the way time moved and didn’t, and her gimping down the hall to check on her son, the troubled forever-boy who could not be trusted to rent his own tuxedo, who even now was getting dressed in the very room in which he grew up, the room in which from the ceiling hung what must have been a hundred model airplanes, and all of it starting with just the one, the dime-store Sesna Lynn bought and wrapped and gave as a present from David’s father who was—Lynn told the boy—traveling on business.

She shouldn’t have done that. She shouldn’t have lied to him. They think honesty is best now, people do. The people who write the books Lynn reads even though it’s too late to change anything. They think it’s always better to tell children the truth even when it hurts. Especially when it does.

It strikes Lynn that all these planes make for a kind of elaborate mobile, and she thinks of David as a baby, the way he would reach for the shapes even as he fell asleep. But when Lynn looks up, all she sees are mistakes, a thousand perfect miniatures of everything she might have done differently.

And now here he is in front of her, dressed in a tuxedo that draws new lines about his person. His shoulders are squarer, his legs made to look longer, and he’s showered and shaved, too. You look great, she says and means it. You look just wonderful.

She reaches up for the loose ends of the tie.

All sorts of lies she told. About the airplane. About just what it was they were doing those nights they drove out to Paulie’s and sat in the Buick. David held the flashlight while she worked on her drawings, the sketch pad propped against the steering wheel. And she told him all kinds of things about colors and lines and how real artists worked among the people. She told him about the circus and the lady turning flips in the air. Real artists, she said, see things that nobody else does. She taught him about the angle of a nose, the slant of a neck, that true beauty was all a measure of symmetry. It all comes down to balance.

And in the meantime, as she sketched, she studied the faces, and she was pretending to be an artist when all she could be was a wife who’d been left by a sad drunk who didn’t know how to be a father. All she could do was search for one thing and then another—the features of a husband, the hollows of cheeks that would be even more pronounced there under the floodlight that marked the joint’s entrance. Paulie’s had been one of Gary’s favorite places, and if he was tempted to come back to Black Creek, he might come here, and it was worth a try, she thought. It was worth something, at least until the bulb in the flashlight began to flicker or until David nodded off, and then it seemed like there was nothing more pointless, nothing that was more of a waste than this. More nights than not, Lynn tore out those sketches and threw them out the window of the Buick. Behind them, in the flush of the taillights, the shapes of Paulie’s regulars, the old faithfuls—the warts and lumps, the squints and cleavage and amputations—all of these shapes and lines were captured and, at once, released to the darkness, and in her brighter moments, Lynn wonders what better truth there is to tell a child, what greater testament than this.

She ties the tie, and she knows David doesn’t want to go to the Black Creek Land Trust Ball, knows it is, in fact, the very last thing he wants to do. Naturally, he would rather be at the table with his glue and his paintbrush, and these planes of his. There’s a real beauty to them, an attention to detail, and some of what Lynn desired—a great proportion of it, really—was for David to be happy like she never could be, and he’s put on the suit to please her. He’s doing this because she’s asked him to, and suddenly, inexplicably, Lynn is afraid again. Lynn begins to shake, and in her ears, there is a kind of roaring which is not unlike the sound of a thousand planes or the rush of the ocean, the horror of what will come next, and then just as quickly, just before it drives Lynn to her knees, things go quiet. Things go absolutely still except for David who is leaning down, David who is asking, What’s wrong? What is it?

Nothing, she says and swats at the air as if at a wasp, as if a wasp was all.

Lynn’s dress is navy with gold trim, beaded and long-sleeved. It is very ugly, she thinks, and she feels very ugly in it. David tells her otherwise, but David isn’t here now. David’s back at the house. David will come later, he says, though Lynn wonders if he’ll come at all. Or if instead, dressed in the tux, he’ll sit down at the table and get working on one of his planes. He loses time, that way, and people, too. He’s told her before, It’s like being somewhere else.

At the club, Lynn does what she ought—meeting people, pretending to remember having met them before. All of the women are in mother-of-the-bride dresses, but on Lynn, such a dress feels like more of a costume. She trips over her hem, tugs at the neckline as if the thing were fitted to someone else.

Here, Ed is in his element, and Lynn isn’t surprised to find herself, for a while, alone at a table cluttered with dishes and silverware and stemmed glasses. She doesn’t even mind it really, the way all these people get on with Ed. He can talk to them, all right. But at least she has these minutes to herself. Time enough to look for David. Time enough to pretend she is elsewhere—Arizona or Nevada, a figure so slight as to be more of a feeling, a brush on a cheek, little more than a breeze, than a shadow saying, Here I am.

Soon, though, everyone makes their way to the tables, and the piano stops, and someone takes a hold of the microphone. A young man, about David’s age, talking about a hometown girl who married a hometown boy, and what does it matter if their love came later rather than sooner in life, and aren’t they the lucky ones to live now, as they do, in a condo on the beach where nobody wears a watch, and somewhere in all the gab, in the tangle of congratulatory cliché, Lynn realizes with a start that the man is talking about her.

Then everyone is clapping, and there is a hand at her back, pushing her forward, and she is moving. Yes, she is drifting between the round tables which are like so many islands, and Lynn in her anchors and gold rope is not anything like the wind but is, instead, a heavy ship, some kind of tanker that moves nowhere of its own accord.

Up the stairs. Onto the stage, and hand by hand, the clapping stops. The room then is so very quiet, and everyone is staring at Lynn, the silly goose, who’s having a hard time now remembering just exactly what it is she’s doing. She smiles at the crowd, and they smile back. A patient group. Not so bad when you get down to it. And someone out there yells, Speech! Then a ripple of laughter, patient but uneasy.

Lynn’s hand fumbles at her side, and her thumb catches in the pockets they make in such dresses, pockets meant for tissues because the mother of the bride is always crying, because never is there not some shade of despair, and that’s the truth, and her thumb catches the pocket, and she finds the cards on which she wrote the words to introduce the oldest living member of the board who is, oh yes, her husband, and she looks at the cards, and the writing is hers, the lines familiar and yet wholly illegible. What words are these she doesn’t know, and she says something in the microphone—what?—and the faces in the crowd smear and run, and Lynn herself isn’t a ship after all. She’s more like the water, more nothing than anything, and David is there, but they aren’t in the building anymore. She isn’t on stage, and they aren’t in the country club, but they must have been because there they are, still in the tuxedo and the dress, Lynn’s skirt fanned across the seat of the Buick.

What a picture we are, Lynn says. This isn’t what she means, but David must know. Too late, the question comes: What happened?

But David knows. David understands, and says, It’ll be all right. They’re going to Paulie’s, but Paulie’s isn’t Paulie’s anymore. It’s Mike’s.

Same difference, Lynn answers. She doesn’t know if that’s true, and she hasn’t even thought about it. She just speaks, and like that, the world is nothing but runs and puddles until it snaps back into the finest expression of realism. Everything is okay. Everything is just as it seems. Old times.

We’ve always had, she says, each other.

Paulie’s isn’t far, and soon, there is the familiar crunch of loose rock under the tires, the same glow of neon in the blue night. It’s the time of day when things darken by the second. David parks and cuts the engine. Lynn can hear him breathing. She has the sense that something has gone horribly wrong. Recently. A long time ago. Now. You got the flashlight? she says. She tries to be funny, tries to make what has become an old joke. She can make out his face. She can tell that he’s smiling, and not for the first time, she thinks how much he looks like Gary.

Another car pulls up and stops. All the doors pop open, and they seem to pour—the girls—like a stream that bobbles over rocks, like Black Creek itself, the very river Ed champions and pretends to love, a creek Lynn and Gary used to swim, waters that glitter and duck and will pull you down if you aren’t careful.

The girls hold each other up as they make their way across the lot, and they are dressed to show. Legs, arms, bellies, and the greater part of chests exposed, and Lynn says, Goodness.

For a minute David says nothing. Lynn watches him watch the girls, and the way he feels isn’t perversion so much as a powerful and unusual attraction. This is the way he feels too much, and when David does speak, he says, They’re lonely. Everybody can see that.

Lynn looks at the girls. No. They can’t.

David breathes and something inside him hums.

When he left, Lynn says, all we had was each other.

The group has gone inside but for one, a girl who stands by the door.

It was more than him, though, Lynn says.

The girl lights a cigarette. She smokes and stands on one foot. She looks out into the lot.

I’ve been meaning to tell you, Lynn says.

She stops. Behind Paulie’s, there’s a dark field, a round slope of a thing with just a sliver of night sky that makes a person feel like she’s very nearly underground.

She could tell him the truth now. She could tell him about his father, things David has known for years and some things he hasn’t.

About those planes, she says. About the one he gave you.

It’s special, David says and maybe he’s talking about the little Sesna, but he’s looking at Paulie’s or the girl or the field that’s bigger than everything. Special are the certain times, the certain places when and where you can measure the curve of the Earth as clearly as if you were above it. Special is Lynn in the sailor dress and David himself and the picture they make and whatever was and whatever is more than Gary, what only begins with being alone in the world.

It’s something else, David says. There isn’t a question, but Lynn understands because she’s his mother, because she can see things other people can’t. She knows more than anything, David wants an answer, and so finally, because she doesn’t have her sketchbook, because she can’t show him the shape of a person’s mouth or the turn of an ear, because too much time has passed, she tries to tell him anything she knows for sure. Yes, she says. It’s something else.